


Battery Life

by audreycritter



Category: Batman - All Media Types
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Gen, TW: Blood, a bad week, but still awful, canon: what's that?, floods, not the worst, solo batman, sometime around tim's robin run maybe but he's not here at all, tw: child injury, tw: poverty
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-20
Updated: 2018-01-20
Packaged: 2019-03-07 05:44:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,966
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13428033
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/audreycritter/pseuds/audreycritter
Summary: Batman has a long, hard week and clinging to the mundane is sometimes the only way to get through.That's just how Gotham always is, though.





	Battery Life

**Monday**   
**11:24 PM**

From his perch on the gargoyle, the rain is so thick he can barely make out the city below. The crumbling cathedral creature spews a writhing cord of white water on the flooding streets below. The Narrows never fare well when the Sprang swells, some alleys flooding enough to cut entire blocks off from the rest of the city.

The place is sinking, inch by steady inch, into the silt sand as the long-abandoned subway tunnels collapse, their supports long rotted. The city is eating itself alive, or the Narrows are descending into hell— neither option is comforting in the least.

A flash of artificial light flickers on a street far below, a heavily powered flashlight roaming in the dark storm. Batman fires a grappling line and adjusts for the slickness of his grip. He lands, curving into the contact to slice soundlessly through the water with a faint spray.

“Monique!  _Monique!_  Mo, getchyo ass back’n here. You leave that fool be.”

The woman holding the flashlight is clutching a thin sheet of plastic, a disposable poncho torn and mended with duct tape, around her shoulders. A girl is hurrying down the dark street, wading through water up to her ankles, a fleece hoodie cinched tight around her face.

“You know he don’t got his meds!” she shouts. The words are mostly lost on the wind, driven down by the rain. She can’t be more than twelve.

The rest of the street is quiet except for the roaring of the wind as it barrels down alleyways and over cars. The water is even deeper in the street itself; this section of the city is, officially, under a state of emergency.

For the Narrows, that mostly means no aid.

The girl is nearing the alley where he’s almost ready to leave, to go survey the next two blocks before working on other tasks. That’s when she stumbles, slips in the trash-littered water and her head goes under. It’s up half a second later, with a cry, and the undercurrent is pulling her toward the yawning and submerged storm drain. There’s a scream across the street.

Batman’s gloved hand closes around her upper arm and hauls her up out of the water. There’s a concrete step against the nearest building, only an inch of water on it, and he sets her there.

“What are you doing?” he asks, his inflection flat. Kids this age, they don’t tend to respond well to anger or intimidation. It either riles them or silences them.

Her eyes are as wide as saucers, rimmed with swollen red, when she begins patting her pockets.

“Oh no, oh  _no_ , no no no,” she sobs, then there’s a sharp intake of ragged breath and her shoulders slump. In one hand, she’s tightly clutching a plastic orange prescription bottle. She blinks away rain, trying to stare up at Batman. “My brother…his meds. For seizures. He wouldn’t listen to my aunt, he say he have to go check on his girlfriend and now he say he won’t come back tonight.”

“Where?” Batman asks, crouching just enough that he’s eye level, to keep the stinging rain out of her face some. “What’s his name?”

“He…it’s Marcus. His name’s Marcus. Apartment 9H, the Avon Tower.”

Batman holds out his hand. “I’ll get them to him. I promise. Go home.”

Monique regards him for a long, steady moment; water’s running off her chin in rivulets, her hoodie drenched. She shivers. “You promise?”

Batman nods.

The bottle is secured in his belt before he watches her trudge against the futile drain tide, arms crossed and head bent, all the way back to her waiting aunt and the flashlight.

Then he’s gone.

Avon Tower, the husk of good intentions in the late eighties, used to look like a nice place. But someone had cut corners on the project and it hadn’t taken long to show it. Now, it’s a teeming stack of inefficient heating, thin and sometimes bowing walls, and too many bare cupboards. It takes him only minutes to find a window belonging to 9H, to trip the lock, to slip inside. He leaves the medicine on the counter of the tiny kitchen, while a slack-jawed couple stops making out to stare at him.

“From Monique,” he says, and then when they look at each other, he leaves, back out the window.

He stops a beating in an abandoned apartment of the next building, kneels on mildewed carpet to do CPR on a collapsed elderly man he isn’t able to save, gives a granola bar from his belt to a crying woman hiding beneath an awning, flexes sore knuckles after zip-tying a bloodied rapist to a stair railing, and tries not to think about twelve year olds drowning in city streets in the dark.

Four in the morning comes and it is still raining, the first floors are moving up if they haven’t already, seeking refuge with neighbors or in hallways. Not a single siren or emergency light interrupts the pre-dawn downpour.

 

**Tuesday**   
**5:51 PM**

The storm is still raging.

Other parts of Gotham are beginning to shift, murmuring with worry. The Sprang and mainland channel climb; the bay shrieks with a furious high tide. He’s back in the Narrows after sleeping half the day, deciding it was dark enough to go out and he couldn’t wait any longer anyway.

It’s gunshots that he hears when his boots first hit rooftop, because of course it is, of course it’s  _always_  that. He doesn’t slow his landing sprint but carries it over until he’s soaring down, cape fluttering stubbornly against the wind and water of the air. The razor-pops of gunfire have been met with screaming and he rounds the corner into the flooded street and scans the windows.

Only heartbeats later, he’s in the building, in the hall where there’s shouting and cursing and smoking holes in the walls, on one side and then another across the hall. A keening sob draws him to the cracked open door of one apartment, dim with burnt out bulbs.

“Nicky. Nicky, baby, Nicky, please.” He’s like magnetic dust, pulled in bits until he converges into action at the threshold of a living room lit with emergency candles.

There’s a child, his head pillowed on a woman’s lap. It would be cozy and sweet if not for the ashen pallor of the boy’s skin, the tears streaming from his clenched eyes, the gasping breaths, the blood leaking from his side into a growing crimson pool. Her hands drip with it, leave fingerprints near his death-blue lips as she squeezes his face and begs.

Field dressing gauze from his belt is already bunched into a tight bundle and he presses it, firm and cruel and necessary, into the wounded side after pulling the tattered shirt back. The effort elicits a scream from the boy’s throat and it tapers off into hysterical sobbing. The mother-- if she is his mother-- does not start at Batman’s sudden presence. It’s likely she hasn’t actually registered him at all.

“Talk to him,” he orders. “Keep him awake.”

“Nicky, Nicky, baby, look at mommy, please, look…”

Batman glances. The boy’s eyes are rolling back, fluttering closed. He rips a glove off to feel pulse. He doubles pressure on the wound and the eyes snap back open with a jolt, while the boy’s body instinctively tries to jerk away. Batman holds him in place with the bandage. There are people yelling behind him, shouts of confusion and a door slamming open. A shelf rattles. In his peripheral, he’s aware of a gathering small crowd, two young men shouting with panicked tones about a kid, someone vomiting.

His world and focus narrows.

Blood slick all over his bare fingers, and he doesn’t let himself think.

For a moment, his gaze meets the mother’s. All she can see must be the cowl lenses and he’s grateful for that shield, from the intensity and desperation. It’s a selfish gratitude and he brushes a finger against the latch for the lens release, just the briefest of half-seconds spared to do it.

“Who’s gonna come?” she pleads. “It’s…they won’t even come without a police escort, not here, not when it’s good weather. Oh god, I should have…I’m so sorry, I’m sorry, Nicky, I’m so…” her attention shifts.

“St. Stephen’s,” Batman says. The wound is seeping, more than a graze, deep in the gut. It’s survivable if they can beat the blood loss and the shock. “Can you make it on foot?”

She nods.

“You have to let me take him,” he says. “Follow as fast as you can.”

She sobs, once, kisses the paling forehead of the boy. “Don’t leave him alone. Not til I’m there. Please.”

The boy is already reaching for her, her name a litany spilling from his mouth, then his arms falter and go limp. He’s conscious but fading and Batman looks down at him, not much more than a young teenager at best, and he tries not to see other faces there in the dark brown eyes with blown pupils. Too many other faces, some with names etched into his heart and others belonging to the case files that never really leave his head.

“Nicky. We’re going to go fast and it’s going to hurt, but then we’ll find people who can help. Can you hold on to my neck? It’s alright if you can’t; I won’t let go.”

The cape detaches with two quick tugs at snaps and he wraps the boy up as well as he can without moving him too much, and then up against his chest like an infant, held with one arm. Thin arms snake around his neck and the grip is weak but determined. There’s a shuddering breath he can feel through the armor, and high-pitched groan.

“You’re doing fine, son,” he says, not sure if it helps in the least, and then he sprints. The little crowd parts; he doesn’t spare a backward glance for the mother or those talking to her and within seconds he bursts back into the howling gale through a roof access door. Grappling one-armed isn’t easy but he can do it, and flying saves them valuable minutes slogging through the water waist-high in some places. Gravel that surrounds the smooth helicopter landing pad scatters underfoot when he lands on St. Stephen’s.

He waits, breathing hard and trying to catch himself, at the edge of the trauma OR until the boy’s eyes close with the sedation. He steps from the shadows with brown-blood sticky fingers, tugging his glove back on, when the mother staggers into the ER. She sees him while talking to a nurse and when she knows, for herself and for her son, that he stayed, he leaves.

Another mugging. An attempted robbery. Lugging generators into stair landings. An overdose.

The sun is rising through the clouds, day and storm both breaking together, when he goes home.

 

**Wednesday**   
**10:46 PM**

The storm leaves the Narrows and his own body both drenched, the sidewalks in water and his bones in aching. His joints and head hurt together but he knows from experience the receding waters will siren-song thugs back out into decimated streets. It’s a city that knows how to pour salt on wounds, spilling it until its not purifying but sustaining, like preserving already rancid meat.

Tonight, his arms throb and his skin sticks to the gauntlets sealed with blood. It’s gonna sting like hell coming off later. He doesn’t think about that. He doesn’t think about it while perching outside a window at St. Stephen’s where a boy slumbers, one kidney short, with the help of strong painkillers. He doesn’t think about it while interrupting fight after fight after fight and one assault after another. There isn’t even information to hunt for, this is just sheer desperation and greed being held in check.

He follows smoke into a crackhouse, drags one sluggish addict after another from the burning walls. A few fight in panic and he lets them. The youngest person he finds in the building is, he hopes, merely the child of one of them and not already an addict. He carries her screaming and biting, while he talks quietly and meaninglessly the whole time, to the home of a social worker who opens the door with bleary eyes and takes her from Batman’s arms while she now screams at being taken from him, redirecting her biting efforts after only a moment of reprieve. The social worker doesn’t seem surprised by any of this.

He doesn’t even know which of the addicts was related to her, if any of them.

When he does go home, early, it’s for sutures and to fall asleep sitting up on the medical unit table, full of simmering anger at the world and Gotham and the Narrows; at himself for wanting it to be better; at himself for not making it happen yet.

He opens his eyes when the blood-streaked face of a boy dances in his dream, a boy he just met and a boy that is his, blending into one. He can’t fall asleep again, so he ignores the pulsing agony in his knee and runs on the treadmill until he can’t do that either, then he sits with his head in his hands and waits for morning.

Morning.

He thinks of coffee in diner mugs and cherry pie on thick-lipped plates, of porcelain tea cups and almond biscuits, of greasy cheeseburgers and chocolate shakes. He fills his mind with them, lets himself dwell on the people across from him in each thought, then sucks in a breath.

He just needs a reset, a new start.

Gotham needs one. If it’s what he takes, he’ll be the battery.

 

**Thursday Night; Technically Friday**   
**3:34 AM**

Batman’s right arm holds his weight up against the curved barrier. The labyrinth is seemingly endless, despite claims about a center, and covered in vines and dust even though it’s deep underground. They drugged him with something, got a dart past the armor right under his chin and his throat itches. He coughs.

There is something…about wrong turns. Costing. Things came with a cost.

He’d murdered people? No, that isn’t right.

No, people die for wrong turns. He is being watched.

The center has the antidote to whatever is pumping through his veins. He’s being betrayed by the steady beating of his own heart. He tries to slow it and gives up. If he slows it too much, he’ll slip into unconsciousness and that wouldn’t help anyone.

The rules, received via closed circuit TV not long after tracing Nygma’s first post-Arkham escape clue, are nagging at him, like a splinter in a fingernail bed.

If he takes a wrong turn, someone is killed.

He has to reach the center to be given the antidote.

Riddler is a horrible person, but also a sick man, and he needs help. But for all his madness, he has his own sort of code-- a respect for ingenuity and technicalities.

Batman slumps briefly against the wall and eyes it, muscles under his armor seizing into rigid cramps and stuttering stuck there for seconds so long he groans. It’s going to get worse. His belt has been confiscated, around the time he was drugged. Someone has a nasty electrical burn from that, or Eddie’s figured out a way around that system and Batman needs to upgrade it soon.

The walls are smooth and concave, arching overhead. It’s nearly parallel to the ground before the opening, and he has no grappling hook, no spiked boots. He evaluates carefully before forcing himself upright.

Over the walls will get him to the center and spare everyone. Nygma will, at least, follow his own rules for this. Batman takes off his gauntlets, checks the spiked deflectors along the forearm clasp. They’re sturdy. They’ve never had to hold his weight before but he supposes that needs to be field-tested anyway.

He flips them around, positions his hands, and then slams the spikes into the wall. One slipping grasp at a time, he goes upward, the spikes biting into the smooth surface just enough to hold him til the next second, the next slamming of gauntlets into wall. He’s getting dizzy and the upside down overhang isn’t helping. He bites his lip hard enough to break the skin, to wake himself out of his gradual stupor.

Over is not exactly a wrong turn.

Nygma is shrieking somewhere in the distance, enraged.

He gets to the room. The antidote is there, as promised.

The four hostages are there.

All dead.

So, Nygma’s adherence to code is failing.

Batman waits with the bodies until the cops arrive.

He goes home with a sore throat, feeling dry and hollow all over, like a husk. He stares at the computer for ten unmoving minutes before he manages to type anything, and beginning to type leads to him noticing the deep gashes across his palms from when the gauntlets had slipped. And then he notices Alfred, who has been clearly waiting a bit for Bruce to pay attention.

He lets Alfred wrap his hands, he looks over evidence again, something sparks a connection.

The cowl presses already disheveled hair down, matting it flat against his head. If he is fast, Nygma will be in Arkham before sunrise…or maybe, if not that, then before noon.

Then, he can sleep, let the dark of nightmares and dead boys’ faces swallow him, the poison of the city he doesn’t have an antidote for yet, except to keep moving. To hope he’s the antidote for someone else.

The water is receding in the Narrows, leaving streets of stinking muck in its wake, but it’s now that he feels like he’s drowning.

 

**Saturday**   
**4:01 AM**

The booth is quiet.

Clark Kent is in a flannel button up, worn jeans.

Bruce is hunched over a cup of coffee, a black hoodie pulled low over his face. It’s barely a disguise, except that nobody will be looking for him here, like this, in Metropolis, with scruff and bruises and shadows under his eyes.

 _Being the right person in the wrong place is half of misdirection_ , he’d told Clark once, like Clark needed to be told, the phone pressed to his ear while he sat in a field of reporters’ desks with just a pair of glasses between him and the world. Maybe it wasn’t for Clark as advice though, and more a statement about what it was like to be Bruce.

“We didn’t have to meet this week, you know.”

“We had plans,” Bruce returns sharply, his bruised and split knuckles wrapped around the mug. His palms are bandaged, too.

“And you’re so bad at improvising,” Clark says, with a raised eyebrow.

A waitress comes over and Bruce sits back just long enough to let her refill his coffee. It smells burnt and stale and he drinks it anyway, without complaint.

“Two pieces of pie,” Clark tells her, grabbing her attention with a wave of two fingers. She nods and they chat for a moment, mutually ignoring Bruce. She’s more chipper than anyone— even Superman— has a right to be at four in the morning.

“I don’t want pie,” Bruce says, sullen, as soon as she walks away. “You can eat mine.”

“Mm,” Clark says. “I won’t hold you to that.”

There’s a newspaper on the table and Clark flips it open, scans the page. “Have I ever told you how much I dislike sports desk?”

“You might have mentioned it,” Bruce says flatly. “Once or twice.”

“Don’t get me wrong, I like a good game. But you’d think it was life or death,” Clark mutters. “Just….” he doesn’t finish, frowning, and flips the paper over. “Reviews for that spy thriller are out.”

“The blog reviews go up sooner,” Bruce says. His shoulders are tightly rolled in toward each other, but his words are still flat and clipped almost like he’s at ease. Like he’s just giving Clark a hard time. There’s a pause. “Isn’t that your paper? You had it before press.”

“I’m a busy man. I don’t read it all then. I like to savor the local stuff.”

“You’re not reading it all now. That review isn’t even yours, it’s AP.”

Clark scans the byline and shrugs. “Movie sounds good, still.”

“Hn.”

“When do you read blogs, anyway?” Clark asks, turning the edge of the paper down to stare at Bruce. The other man beginning to relax, bit by little bit.

“Couldn’t sleep,” Bruce says, finishing the coffee. “I—”

He cuts off while the waitress sets plates and forks on the table. Clark thanks her and when she walks away, Bruce pinches the bridge of his nose with two fingers and closes his eyes. Clark watches him, quiet, one hand on a fork.

“Do you want to go?”

“Stop trying to get rid of me,” Bruce snaps. He exhales and sags into his own bandaged palms, elbows propped on the table.

Clark waits, then: “That’s not what I meant. And you—”

“I know,” Bruce says crossly. “Just do me a favor. Ignore anything I say the rest of the time we’re here.”

“Done,” Clark says, with a smile.

Bruce takes a bite of his pie. He makes a small noise, almost of evaluation.

“Not as good as Alfred’s?” Clark teases.

“As your mother’s,” Bruce replies seriously.

“She buys those, you know,” Clark confides. “From Dillons.”

“I don’t have to hear your heartbeat to know when you’re lying.”

Clark laughs. “Okay. So, Mr. Insomniac. Should I take Lois to see the movie?”

“If you like terrible movies,” Bruce answers. “Henschel at the Post was not impressed.”

“Yeah, I think I’ll go anyway. Maybe you should come.”

The pie is gone and Bruce crosses his arms on the table. Clark has the distinct impression he’d prefer to be perching somewhere high. He buries his face in his arms, taking too-precisely even breaths. Clark reaches out and puts a hand on his head, the soft cotton of the hoodie pillowed by hair underneath. He holds his hand, cupped there, for a moment, listening to Bruce’s thudding heartbeat.

Then it slows and he takes a deep breath and sits up, won’t look at Clark. His gaze is to the side when he mutters, “What a hell of a week,” as if it’s an explanation.

After that, something shifts. Bruce says something Clark doesn’t understand as a joke until thirty seconds too late, and by then Bruce has that infuriating amused quirk in his mouth. Clark orders more coffee and, with constant scans for unwelcome company, they discuss a League case. Clark does most of the talking but Bruce’s interjections and additions are less acidic. Second pieces of pie are ordered and consumed; they leave the diner together with the faint pink blush of sun in the East.

“Clark,” Bruce says, pausing at the sidewalk where they’ll split ways. He always insists on driving himself to these meetings.

Clark is patient and there are days he thinks he learned half of that from waiting Bruce out.

“I needed this,” Bruce says quietly, his hand making a vague gesture at his side. “Today. Thank you.”

“You bet,” Clark says easily, automatically. He means it, that he’d show up in a blink for this. He watches Bruce’s retreating form, damaged hands shoved into hoodie pockets, weaving in the early morning foot traffic toward a parking garage.

He pulls out his phone and orders movie tickets, then turns to walk home, the receipt for three in his email.

It’s worth another shot, he figures. He’s not certain Bruce will come, thinks he probably won’t actually, but he can stay a little hopeful.


End file.
